The Potter's Tale: A Colonsay Life

By Dion Alexander

 The Potter’s Tale is a story of one man’s journey of discovery and self discovery on one of the most beautiful islands on the Hebrides – Colonsay. Dion Alexander was ‘the Colonsay Potter’ through the 1970s and his own story is interwoven with that of some of the legendary characters of the islands in that period, one of the last in which Gaelic came naturally to the community. It is also the story of beginning to think about how to keep a small remote community dominated by a landed estate alive and viable in the face of modern pressures. The Colonsay of the 1970s had no electricity or affordable housing and an erratic ferry service. The book is an autobiography, a reflection of a world still close in time but in some ways very distant interwoven with much of history, tradition and folklore, and a moving account of the trials, triumphs and tribulations of a small community. Above all it is woven with a deep love of the magical place that is Colonsay.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Birlinn
• Release date: Jul 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9780857909459

Dion Alexander

Dion Alexander moved in 1971 to Carsaig on Mull to set up a pottery before moving to Colonsay. He set up a pottery on Colonsay through the 1970s before leaving for South Uist in 1980 to become the first manager of the Co Chomunn at Lochdair. In 1983 he moved to Glengarry and began work for Shelter Scotland where he set up the Lochaber Housing Association. He has continued to specialise in that area and has both written a number of high profile reports and has chaired a large number of committees and action groups on housing and fuel poverty across the Highlands. He now lives near Dornoch.

Book preview

1

I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING

The very first time I laid eyes on Colonsay I barely even knew its name, far less that it would, soon enough, become my home and my mentor.

It was a sunshine-with-showers afternoon in the early summer of 1971 and a long-haired, self-absorbed, 25-year-old ex-art student, male and clearly a late developer, stepped off one of Bertie Bowman’s hard-worked buses at the Clansman Restaurant and Pub in Pennyghael, a tiny settlement at the gateway to the Ross of Mull which is the long, south-westernmost arm of the Inner Hebridean island of Mull. The deposited figure wore maroon velvet flares frayed at the knees and a collarless working man’s vest, which he had dyed, rather fetchingly he felt, a brick-dust pink. His general appearance was underscored by a somewhat dilapidated pair of moccasins which had never been watertight and were now proving even less so. A fairly typical product of the time and place of his upbringing, the new arrival was hoping to be met by Alasdair MacDonald, the man who had placed a small ad in the Personal Columns of the Times – which then still took up most of its front page – seeking a potter who would also double up and help him fish lobsters from his creel boat.

I just about qualified for half of this intriguing job description as someone partially trained as a studio potter (Wimbledon School of Art, late 60s, Certificate of Industrial Ceramics, only just). The ad appealed strongly to my romantic and escapist tendencies, which included the fond belief that I had always been miscast as a denizen of the over-domesticated south and south-west of England, where I had been raised and schooled and where I was then engaged in a subconscious exploration of my career options as I worked on a crushing machine for a firm of Wiltshire building contractors.

On health and safety grounds alone I knew that I needed to get off the crusher and start moving, quite possibly to the wild Highland roots on which I had some claim and which had always attracted me. Besides, the all-female-staffed Inniemore Summer School of Painting in Carsaig, where I was now headed with my new boss, seemed to offer much better prospects for an active social life than the narcoleptic West Country backwater in which I had become becalmed.

As my new and agreeably eccentric boss drove me in his well-worn kilt and shiny red Morris pick-up van along one of the narrowest and most inviting of single track roads (the ones which have tufts of grass growing up the middle), my senses were buzzing with the anticipation of what Carsaig would have to offer, and from the deep pleasure too which the then unfamiliar but spectacularly beautiful island landscape had been serving up ever since I had climbed on and off the Mull car ferry from Oban.

But the steep and dramatic descent from the road’s seven-hundred-odd feet high point into the hamlet (a farm, two mansion houses and a few cottages) of Carsaig took my breath away just as surely as it had and has done to countless visitors before and since. For, falling away precipitously from the narrow single track, spreads a monumental, terraced, semi-circular amphitheatre formed from ancient volcanic rock that cradles a luxuriantly green and graceful valley, and there, beyond the ocean’s lapping edge on the slate grey sands of Carsaig Bay, stretches the shimmering, deep blue sea of the southern Inner Hebrides (as viewed on a good sunny day, of course, but such it more or less was) with its scattering of magical isles: furthest away to the south the substantial islands of Islay and Jura; nearest at hand, and though still ten miles away seemingly close enough to touch, the islets known as the Isles of the Sea – or the Garvellachs – and to one of which that most famous Hebridean saint of all, Columba, habitually retreated to clear his mind of anything but God. And there in the middle but off to the right a bit of this vast and spellbinding seascape and looking small and isolated in its ocean surround, lay the little island of Colonsay which, with its, from that angle, concealed and interconnected little sister, Oronsay, were just ten miles long and not more than three miles wide between them as I would, eventually, come to discover.

And although I had no idea then that I would be going to live there, it didn’t take very long before I knew who I would wish to go with me. For, within a few weeks of taking up my new duties at Inniemore Lodge I had fallen well, truly and headlong for the loveliest of all the nice girls who were employed to do the chores there; making sure that the guests’ beds were made, sheets washed, meals prepared, rooms cleaned, everything set up so that they could spend their days learning to paint under the kindly eye and expert tutelage of Alasdair’s wife, the wonderful painter Julia Wroughton.

Jane was 19, tall, titian-haired and as close as you would ever be likely to come to seeing Botticelli’s Venus in the flesh, albeit now reincarnated in jeans and T-shirt and speaking modern English rather than Renaissance Italian. She shone from the inside too and but to see her was to love her. I, in response, radiated hot waves of more than purely spiritual interest which, heaven knows why, though it is true to say there were hardly any other potentially suitable male options readily available, were unexpectedly requited.

We did what lovers do on their journeys of discovery, including getting to know Carsaig and its environs as well as each other. After-work visits to the pub in Pennyghael were part of the pattern and there we got to know the resident locals rather than the transient artists and visitors who stayed with us for a week or two in Inniemore’s secluded paradise. Whenever we ventured back over the crest of the hill from our Carsaig enclave we encountered the more typical island world, bubbling away unobtrusively but ever ready to share its day-to-day life in the friendliest of fashions and, if you happened to be in the right place at the right time, its – to us outsiders – unfamiliar enchantments. These were features of a more discrete but distinctive community which had its own strange tongue, infectious music and a wealth of local anecdotes and traditions; and though the language, called Gaelic but pronounced ‘gallick’, was totally incomprehensible – though fascinating – to me and my companions, the music and the stories were tailor-made for direct enjoyment by anyone, not least our young and curious selves. I lapped it all up and was hungry for more.

Never more so than on a Saturday night when the handful of older, Gaelic-speaking locals who lived within striking distance of the bar would congregate for a plurality of convivial drams matched by an equally generous sharing of stories and music with whoever else happened to be there, no matter where they hailed from, and that included the motley gaggle of that summer’s new intake of seasonal workers to the locality. There was Pennyghael-born and bred Duncan Lamont, a renowned piper and soldier who had fought in both World Wars, and his brother Hugh who was equally famous locally as a bard – a composer of songs – in their mother tongue, even though it was then only spoken by Mull’s older natives. There was Niellachan who always came with his fiddle, and old Tom, our nearest neighbour from Carsaig Farm, who would drive over the hill with us, his mouth-organ slotted into a jacket pocket. Their ages became irrelevant as they made their Highland music together afresh, Duncan accompanying Tom and Niellachan on his chanter, but with a break now and again for Gaelic songs from Hugh or Tom and a blether with whoever; and if the three MacCallum brothers didn’t themselves play musical instruments or budge much from their preferred positions at the bar, it was still abundantly clear that they were as happy with the cultural offering as the rest of us, albeit that it was an ingrained and familiar part of their upbringing and island world, one to which we came as strangers but were quickly coming to know and like, and were growing ever more intrigued by.

Another thing we noticed back in Carsaig, as we feasted daily on the normally stunning view south across the sea to the neighbouring islands, with the Caledonian MacBrayne’s steamer, the King George V, ploughing its languid and elegant furrow in the foreground as it circled Mull with its boatload of summer visitors to the smaller islands of Iona and Staffa, was that while Mull would all too frequently be experiencing a shower or downpour, there would be low-lying Colonsay basking unconcernedly in the sunshine as the clouds leapfrogged over it or ignored it altogether, preferring the high hills of the big islands or the Argyllshire mainland upon which to relieve themselves of their copious and soggy loads.

We joked about it, we were curious about it but thought little more of it at the time. The penny would not drop till after we had both finished our summer season jobs and left our Carsaig idyll behind us. It certainly hadn’t yet dropped when Alasdair and Julia managed to get hold of director Michael Powell’s 1945 black-and-white film, I Know Where I’m Going, which they showed in the dining room one late summer evening to guests, staff and invited locals. The film had been largely shot in Carsaig, much of it by the then unchanged granite pier from which Alasdair and I went out each day in the boat to set and lift his lobster creels. Key scenes had been filmed in the self-same boatshed now used by father and son Tom and Sandy Brunton, who shared the pier with us and fished in their coble for salmon which they trapped and lifted using bag nets set along the shore past the Nun’s Cave. The island of ‘Kiloran’ to which the heroine, played by Wendy Hiller, has such a frustrating time trying to get across is, in reality, Colonsay.

Perhaps more influential, in a subliminal way, on my eventual determination to try to go and live on Colonsay with Jane, was the beautiful old ballad used as the film score. It begins ‘I know where I’m going and I know who’s going with me . . . ’. When I was a small boy growing up in an isolated West Berkshire farmhouse, my mother used to sing it to me at my bedside, wistfully, heartbreakingly. It was so haunting I could hardly bear – or resist – listening to it, then or now. It evoked strange and powerful echoes, perhaps from another life or a life yet to come.

It is less fanciful to say that when we left Carsaig, after our long, sweet summer idyll had ended and autumn days had drawn in, we did not yet know that Jane was pregnant, that we would even live together let alone get married, or what direction our lives would take. In fact we were to marry in March 1972, and our first son, Daniel, was born less than three months later. ‘I know where I’m going’? Neither of us, at that point in time, had a clue, though it wasn’t too long before we started to find out.

By that Christmas, we had found a decent flat together not too far from Edinburgh’s Haymarket, where we would await the arrival of our first-born. While I had been down south receiving characteristically generous hospitality – but also an understandable version of the ‘third degree’ – from Jane’s parents, their family friend and doctor had spelt out my new responsibilities to me in terms which any five-year-old, even one who preferred engaging with clay, could not have failed to take on board. Jane’s confinement, he made absolutely clear, would have to be spent where the best prenatal care would be available at all times in case any complications arose and not, most certainly not, in some rural backwater, for example a remote Hebridean island where such civilised requirements could not be entirely guaranteed.

However, the good doctor deemed Edinburgh acceptable and as well as working in the ‘Ceramic Workshop’ near the Castle I took the first steps in exploring the idea of getting us back to an island life, finding a cottage to live in, setting up a studio pottery and, I trusted, living happily ever after. It all seemed so simple to my innocent mind, and it was equally obvious which Hebridean island would be top of the shortlist – Colonsay – because it had always seemed to beckon, albeit that the fixation had been formed long-distance without any reality check. So, to begin to put this right I wrote to the island’s sole proprietor and laird, Lord Strathcona, sketching out my aspirations and wondering whether he might have a cottage for us to live in and an old building for me in which to set up my pottery. To my delight I received an encouraging reply from his then wife, another Jane, who invited me over to the island for a recce.

Thus it was, though it was only a year since I had caught my first bedazzled but long-distance glimpse, that after a slow and bewitching ferry journey from West Loch Tarbert on the Mull of Kintyre mainland via the ports of call of Craighouse on Jura and Port Askaig on Islay, I walked, full of nervous excitement, down the gangplank of the M.V. Arran and set foot for the very first time on Colonsay’s bustling pier.

Local eyes were always keen to see who was coming off the ferry and doubtless I was clocked by all those present as an unfamiliar summer season ‘visitor’ – the native islanders’ preferred description, rather than the more disparaging ‘tourist’ – their choice of word, I would later come to appreciate, a true reflection of the courtesy and consideration they would invariably show any stranger who landed on their shores. Not that they were lacking in curiosity, but the usual Hebridean approach, I came to understand, was to engage the newcomer in the friendliest kind of conversation and to elicit information so agreeably and painlessly that the provider was usually completely unaware just how much they had parted with. The fact that this complete stranger had been met and greeted so warmly on the pier by Lady Jane Strathcona had not gone unnoticed, but the questions arising would soon enough be answered by the islanders’ tried and trusted intelligence-gathering methods. By the time the ferry returned, usually two or three days later on its next round trip to the island, most details about the visitor and the purpose of his visit would either have been discovered directly or more or less accurately deduced from assorted clues, the results shared and compared and a perfectly newsworthy and generally reliable story about the stranger and his business would have been pieced together and steadily improved by general circulation.

The island Lady Jane showed me round exceeded all my imagined expectations. Even though I had gained some familiarity with the range and the splendour of Hebridean charms during the time spent on Mull, it was very surprising to find such variety within Colonsay’s much more limited confines. The rocky and rugged east side of the island, with its ‘capital’ of Scalasaig, where the ferry berthed and the island’s only shop, hotel and pub were located, was matched on the west by a huge expanse of soft green machair land, white sandy beaches, dark sea-beaten skerries and a huge, blue-grey, pulsating ocean stretching out to the extended line of the distant, western horizon, interrupted only by the lonely Dubh Hirteach (‘The dark St Kildan’) lighthouse.

Further on, a patchwork of neat, white croft-houses and small fields soon began to appear and in the very middle of the island there was a sheltered valley cradling a long, narrow and picturesque loch. Much more unexpectedly, there were substantial areas of broad-leafed woodland around the Strathcona mansion, Colonsay House, which lies between the Home Farm at Kiloran – so that’s where ‘Kiloran’ came from – and one of the most beautiful bays anywhere on Earth, the golden-sanded, dune-fringed arc of douce Kiloran Bay which, for some reason, the National Geographic Magazine once accorded only second place in its world-wide assessment.

My memory tells me that the air was sweet and full of bird song, there were wild flowers everywhere, the cattle and sheep were fat and contented, that everyone and anyone who passed you on the road would give a cheery wave and were just as friendly if you got a chance to say hello. Moreover, there were tantalising glimpses of a different and fascinating community life going on – there was a lot of Gaelic being spoken, noticeably more than in the Ross of Mull, and tractors and trailers as well as cars buzzed by on the single-track roads. There also seemed to be a good few working boats using the harbour at Scalasaig, there were island children, there was chatter and banter, there was humour and laughter.

By the time Lady Jane had shown me a vacant and lovely old-fashioned cottage next to the pier and harbour that we might be able to live in and an old stone-built, slate-roofed boathouse to the side of the harbour in which I could set up my studio (subject to Lord Strathcona’s approval, Lady Jane stressed, but with an optimistic look in her eye). I was hooked. Colonsay was perfect: when could we come?

It took another few frustrating months before the agreements were reached about the cottage and the boathouse, and the essential arrangements could be made for our move to the island. True to the all-you-need-is-love, who-cares-about-the-lack-of-ready-cash spirit of the age we were signed-up members of, we had little money to spend but didn’t worry too much. We went to look for some furniture for our first unfurnished home together at Madame Doubtfire’s junk-shop in Stockbridge, a veritable treasure trove. The biggest treasure turned out to be Madame Doubtfire herself who, weighing us up in an instant and reminding us that we would need a good kitchen table, pointed out and sold us a beautiful, big solid oak one for just one pound – a generous-hearted gesture if ever there was one. This was the same table under which our children crawled and scrawled and upon which they ate, drew, played games, and eventually outgrew and left behind for continuing parental use.

The furniture-buying might be skimped – who needed a bedstead when a double mattress on some chipboard propped up on kiln bricks would do? – but furnishing the new pottery studio was a more serious matter requiring a business-like focus and a scary amount of capital, neither of which had exactly proved fortes of mine hitherto. Though the bank seemed happy enough to feed the end-of-term overdraft habit I had established when at art school, they recoiled at my ‘business’ proposition and wouldn’t help unless some other financial guarantees could be provided.

To the rescue came a bold and ambitious new government agency, set up only a few years before to try to reverse the population loss and general decline of Britain’s remotest corners, the Highlands and Islands Development Board or the HIDB, as it was popularly known. They promised me a grant of just over £1600 to get the business set up which, they also said, I wouldn’t ever have to repay as long as I kept it going for a minimum of five years. It was a calculated gamble on their part, one of a great many which they boldly took over the years, some of which failed quietly, others more spectacularly, but most of which produced tangible benefits for the people and the communities they were intended to help. The fact that, despite my repeated pleas to them, their grant cheques only reached me and my bank account six months after I had taken out a loan and spent the money on equipping the studio, I now grudge them not. What the HIDB was able to do for all those like me, I would gradually come to appreciate as I became more and more involved in community development issues in the years to come, was truly far-seeing and influential in helping to make the Highlands and Islands of today so much more positive-minded, in thought and in deed, than it was then – a period still characterised by the historic self-doubt and negativity to which too many Highlanders and Islanders had, not without some justification, become prone.

I had self-doubt and negativity all of my own making to try to keep in check as my pal Frank and I drove the stuffed-full hired van through the late August night to get the 6 a.m. ferry to Colonsay from the pier on West Loch Tarbert. It didn’t help that we were pulled over by the flashing blue light of an Argyllshire police car in the wee small hours and asked to account for ourselves and our load but, in one of the many lessons I would come to learn about the Highland way of life and its sense of close community, it turned out that one of the policemen was a native of Carsaig and since I had got to know his father, Tom, and much more importantly since his father knew me, he knew too, because his neighbours Alasdair and Julia had naturally told old Tom, nearly as much about our Colonsay plans as we knew ourselves. We had authenticated our credentials and were sent on our way with wishes of good luck. We made as quick a round trip to Colonsay as ferry timetables then allowed to unload all the pottery equipment in the boathouse and, much more importantly, to get the cottage ready to live in so that I could bring my new family over to it on the next available ferry.

The Arran was a modern for its times, side-loading vehicular ferry – cars were parked in the hold of the vessel and driven onto a platform which hoisted you slowly to quayside level where you waited for a side flap, known as the ramp, to be lowered and over which you then drove onto the pier and away. The lift on the old Arran was notoriously temperamental: if the weight